‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator was employed by the Department of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing human anatomical specimens for medical reference books. Within her artistic workspace, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a museum curator, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

An Artistic Restlessness

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of sweets and condiment containers. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it genuinely irritated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. Each was coated in a single shade of blue then using an anatomical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to expose the underside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the radical innovator in one corner, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

A key insight from a ongoing display is the way it follows these anatomical influences through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. However, the reality was uncovered much later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” remembers a scholar. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were the exact shades used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books in a manual for surgical anatomy utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Shifting to Natural Materials

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Questioned about the move to natural substances, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the piece retained its potency – the leaves and petals now completely dried out though wonderfully undamaged. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. At times, she showed inauthentic creations while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Confronting the Violence of War

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She photocopied and enlarged them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|